I found this great quote in an article on literacy in the Economist: Literacy may be under attack from electronic media, but thatâs actually nothing new. In fact, the assault on the written word began not with the Macintosh computer in 1984, but with Samuel Morseâs demonstration of the telegraph in 1844â"an innovation a colleague on The Economist insists, quite correctly, on calling the âVictorian internetâ. The article itself is very interesting.